Definitely a question of the requirements justifying the scale and cost of output.

If the price is justifiable or not depends on your use case. But if you flash drives systematically, then you will spend way more time if you use USB hubs. Apart from the actual speed, UX is a major point. For instance, often enough drives fail during flashing and with a USB hub it is difficult to tell which ones failed and which ones succeeded.

Balena Etcher can also create bootable drives which is a lot harder than just rsyncing files to them.

Or easier depending on what exactly you are doing. Rsync has a lot of switches, 'dd' has 'if' and 'of' :)

It’s clearly meant for a commercial or a funded setting. As a hobbyist even if you have a bunch of SBC’s you need flashed like if you are building a Pie cluster for some reason or you have a bunch of them for automation you still would only do this once, so it taking 10min or an hour isn’t a big deal.

If you are pumping out 100’s or 1000’s of these a week yet alone a day you are probably making money of it or supporting an activity that does.

Does your time not have value? The monthly tithes should more than pay for it.

Yes, but the work's already been done for years.

Again, I think this device isn't a terrible value, but a $2-300 device would be a lot sweeter proposition for my demographic.

Depends on how much value said time has, and how much of it one is willing to donate. I, for one, wouldn't mind burning two dozen USBs/SDs each Sunday with some cobbled-together hardware and software. I'm pretty sure that 12-port or more powered USB hubs can be gotten quite cheaply.